Robert Young

Getting ready to move. I’ve lived in this home for twenty-seven years and have twenty-seven years worth of stuff to go through. Or, I guess I could just take it all and make it easier. No, this is the perfect time to edit and revise my life.

Furniture, clothes, books, files. I’m looking over them all, making decisions to carry or cut. None of it is easy, but the hardest is deciding which files to take.

I’ve got thirty years worth of work here (yes, I brought some with me from the last place I lived). I have copies of all my works, and although I have been lucky to have had more than twenty books published, I have many more that are not published. Do I keep them and keep trying? Or, dump them and move on?

In 1986 I wrote a picture book called Who Stinks? It’s about a bear who wakes up in the spring and smells something bad. Very bad. Readers follow the bear as he moves out of his cave and into the forest, blaming every creature he comes across for emitting that noxious smell. In the end, the bear discovers who it is, much to his chagrin.

I sent that story to about fifty publishers, and all rejected it. My agent sent it out to numerous others, and the result was the same. I left the manuscript alone for several years, and then started sending it out again. Last year, I finally found a home for the book: Bushbaby Press.

Along the road to publication, I kept all the rejection letters and postcards as well as the few personal responses I received. I wanted to rejoice in them when (not if!) the book got published. Well, I’ve done that now so I guess I can recycle that file.

But it’s not quite so easy. And neither is dumping so much of the other files I’ve built over the years. Here’s the way I’m looking at it, though. I can either hang onto all the stuff from the past, or I can make space – in my head as well as the file drawers – for future projects.

Now, it’s not going to be so hard after all…